


J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste

by melannen



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon Era, Gen, M/M, Other, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-19
Packaged: 2018-03-13 20:12:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3394883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Enjolras’ wristmark reads “Vive la République!”, which is completely unhelpful - it could be any of his friends, or even all of them together. (It could also be the revolution itself, at the moment of victory. Enjolras likes to say it’s that.) Really, the only person he knows who it couldn’t <i>possibly</i> be is Grantaire. After all, Grantaire’s says nothing at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste

**Author's Note:**

> And elaboration on [an old Tumblr post of mine](http://melannen.tumblr.com/post/86209875612/this-morning-i-accidentally-an-amis-au-where). Title is a quote from Volume IV Book 12 Chapter 6 "Waiting": "I have read Plato, but there was nothing left for me."

Enjolras spent a lot of time in his waistcoat, with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, and Grantaire found it impossible not to notice. Oh, it wasn't to the point of indecency. He didn't walk the streets or go to class like that; it was only in semi-private spaces like the cafe, or a gathering of friends; and it was only gauche in the mild, thoughtless way that Enjolras was often gauche, when he cared too much about principles and forgot people.

It was risky, though, to show the writing on his arm like that. Quite apart from the fact that his soulmark read VIVE LA REPUBLIQUE in careful, bold lettering, the hand of a sign-painter or poster artist, which could be read from across a street, and was not exactly politic in the current climate -

But your soulmark was meant to be the first words your soulmate said, after they became the person who could love you, truly and purely, for the rest of their life. It wasn't always the first thing you said to each other. Sometimes it was. Sometimes two people would know each other for thirty years before they could say the right words to each other. Sometimes one person would say the words, and then have to wait half a lifetime before the other one was ready. Or an entire lifetime. It was an answer, not a promise, and if you weren't fully paired yet, and showed your words incautiously, it would be far too easy for the wrong person to use them to manipulate you.

"Why do you do that?" Grantaire asked him finally, one night, when he was still learning the group's patterns, and was drunk enough that he didn't care if he disrupted them, and he'd been catching himself staring at the red-stained cords of Enjolras's forearm for what seemed like hours.

"Do what?" he replied, surprised. "Attend lectures?" Well, perhaps Grantaire hadn't been following the gist of the conversation very closely, but that was okay, it couldn't have been a very gripping conversation.

"Show off your arms," he said, waving his around. "Don't you want to keep that for yourself?"

Enjolras frowned, at looked down at his mark, and then gestured around the room. "Aren't I among brothers?" he asked.

Admittedly half the people in the room had their coats off and their sleeves turned up; it was a warm evening and the back room got stuffy; but that was entirely different. "Combeferre and Courfeyrac show their arms here because they're already paired, and they're horribly smug," Grantaire said. Courfeyrac grinned smugly at him. Smug or not, it was pretty accepted for well-paired people to become more casual about their marks, if they wished. "Joly and Bossuet because they share an execrable sense of humor--" Joly and Bossuet's marks matched, a line of an obscure drinking song that was offensive both for its content and its puns. They raised their glasses to him. "And my guess is that Feuilly's doing it as a deliberate protest against your elitist bourgeois sensibilities that assume everyone worth talking to can afford a fancy soulmark initiation ceremony when they're thirteen."

"And the assumption that everyone can read," Feuilly added dryly.

Grantaire tipped his glass at Feuilly in acknowledgement. "For which I respect the hell out of him," Grantaire said. "Whereas I show my bare arms to be deliberately offensive, because I'm a miserable piece of shit who's going to die sad and lonely, and I don't care who knows it. You, on the other hand, Enjolras, presumably have somebody waiting for you. A Leana or Aristogeiton to your Harmodius, and given their language, they probably won't outlive you by much more than their classical counterparts, so you've got that going for you."

Enjolras frowned. "But I'm not waiting," he said, puzzled.

"Oh? You have a lover hidden away somewhere? I'm sorry I assumed, then," Grantaire said, ignoring the sinking feeling in his gut, which was probably caused by a lack of wine as much as anything else.

"No," he said. "Not hiding. Not hiding any more than the monarchy forces me to, anyway - my soulmate is my Patria. And anytime any fellow citizen of France says "Vive la République" to me, that is my soulmate speaking in their voice."

"He actually believes that," Bahorel rumbled in Grantaire's ear, as he draped himself warmly over Grantaire's shoulders from behind his chair.

"You don't need to say it like you're humoring me," Enjolras replied, "I already know what you think."

"And what does your Lady France have written on her, in your hand?" Grantaire asked. "Pigeon droppings?"

"A mark need not be reciprocated to be real, Grantaire," Enjolras said.

"Ah, _true_ nobility," Grantaire replied.

"Hear, hear," said Jehan. "A toast to Enjolras's soulmate! A toast to Lady France and to all who love her!"

Grantaire tipped his chair back and looked up at Bahorel. "Let's you and I blow this joint and go somewhere I can breathe," he said.

"Septs-Billiards?"

"Works for me."

The Cafe du Septs-Billiards was also a known gathering-place for the discontented and revolutionary; Bahorel, of course, would not allow himself to be seen there otherwise. Grantaire had no particular objections, and most of the discussion there took place in the public dining area, and was therefore by necessity more circumspect than at the Corinthe. It also attracted a less aristocratic class of rabble-rouser, which meant that Grantaire's bare arms did not stand out so much among the working men and women who had never been part of that society which considered it a _good_ idea to know for certain, from adolescence, if anyone would ever love you.

Bahorel kept his sleeves down. Of course, Bahorel, in his intrepidly impeccable fashion, would never consider taking his coat off in public. Grantaire was fairly sure he'd had the initiation and his arm was as blank as Grantaire's, though. He may have been born a peasant, but the sort of peasants who sent their sons to school in Paris also shelled out to the Church for soulmarks. But if there was anyone who had "will die young and free" written all over him, it was Bahorel. You didn't need to see his wrist to see that.

"He _does_ mean it, you know," Bahorel told him, after they'd killed another couple bottles of wine. "And he's not going to be looking anywhere else _regardless_ , so it's not as if it does him any harm."

Grantaire snorted into his cups. "And how many besotted young people have thrown themselves at him, shouting that phrase like it's their last hope of heaven?"

Bahorel made a non-committal gesture. "You'd be surprised how many of them turn out to be true children of the revolution, in the end," he said. "Besides I'm fairly sure they'd do it anyway. He couldn't keep his predilections a secret if he tried, and you _have_ seen him, right?"

Grantaire had indeed seen him. He'd started to see a lot more of him of late. It wasn't intentional - or at least not _deliberately_ intentional. But they had colonized his favorite bad wineshop, and Bahorel and Bossuet separately speaking for him was apparently enough that they trusted him in their inner council, and they _were_ the most interesting thing going on.

_Depressingly_ interesting, but then, what wasn't.

"Anyway, I'm not completely sure he's not right," Bahorel added.

"You're joking."

Bahorel kicked him under the table. "I may not be a dewy-browed optimist like some of them but I'm not a black-hearted cynic like you. Besides, you haven't seen him in action yet."

That was true. He hadn't. And the first time he did, it was definitely unintentional: he was spending an evening in the Grappe de Raisin. If the Septs-Billiards attracted a lower class of patron than the Amis' usual, the Grappe de Raisin wasn't even on the same scale. But the wine was cheap, strong and nasty, so were the patrons, and the gambling was honest, more-or-less. The shirtsleeved working men and less-than-shirtsleeved working women who inhabited the place had accepted him as one of their own mostly because he'd never asked or expected them to.

He was slouched in the back of the main room, pondering whether it was worth the trouble to try to get up and find a game of dominoes, when the alley door suddenly slammed open, and Enjolras, Courfeyrac and Prouvaire came tumbling through. It was definitely them; that hair, that hat, and that fashion sense together were unmistakeable. That was the worst possible group to wind up here - if they'd had Feuilly, Bahorel, or even Bossuet, they might have managed in the Grappe de Raisin, but there was no mistaking those three for anything but the pampered sons of gentry they so obviously were. He huddled back further into his corner, embraced his wine bottle protectively, and prepared to watch the floor show.

There was a moment of quiet while the three students and the wine-shop's denizens assessed each other. Enjolras peered around the room with a frown that caught his bottom lip, and then huddled with the other two. _Not your kind of place, eh, Enjolras_ , Grantaire thought to himself, and then Courfeyrac called across the room:

"Grantaire, do you know these people? Can you vouch for them?"

How in _hell_ had they seen him back there? "I know them well enough to know that they don't need any more of your kind of trouble."

The three students muttered to each other again, and then Enjolras said, "Good enough. Citizens, we've had a touch of bother with the Sûreté about some Republican pamphlets, but if we can confuse our backtrail enough for a bit of doubt we should be clear, and we'd be much obliged if you helped with the confusing."

"Must be nice to know the Sûreté's scared of your daddy," someone shouted from somewhere.

Enjolras quirked his lips into a twisted excuse for a smile. "We all do what we can with what we have," he said.

"Huh," said one of the more respected regulars, and tapped a domino against the table. "R? You know these jokers? Can you vouch for them?"

"They're fools," he called back, "And they drank their hubris off a silver spoon, and wouldn't know real life if it stomped them with a hobnailed boot. But they _can_ be trusted. And they do know what they're doing, more or less."

The man shrugged. "Well, we ain't too friendly to the police 'round here in general, so that shouldn't be a problem."

" _Thank_ you," Enjolras said, and started unbuttoning his coat. "Would anyone be willing to trade an old waistcoat and jacket for new? And then we'll be out of your way," he said, as he shrugged out of his own outer layers, and Jehan started to do the same with his while Courfeyrac stared mournfully at his fashionably tailored sleeves.

There was a murmur among the patrons again, and while it wasn't precisely friendly it wasn't outright hostile like he'd expected five minutes ago. Then Enjolras started rolling up his sleeves, and one of the women nearest the door grabbed at his wrist and said "What's this, then?"

"It's my soulmark," he told her, gently reclaiming his arm, and turned it out so it could be seen more clearly.

" _Vive la République_?" said the same man who'd spoken up before, reading for the majority of patrons who couldn't. "They burned _that_ into your arm?"

The lower classes, who rarely encountered them themselves, sometimes had only the vaguest and oddest ideas about what soulmarks actually meant. He'd seen aristocrats get violently angry, when they heard that sort of thing as an insult.

Enjolras only smiled, a smile Grantaire couldn't remember ever seeing from him before. " _France_ burned that into my arm, Citizen. It's all I can do to give her my soul in return."

"Vive la Republique," someone replied, and then someone else took it up; before he knew it half the shop was cheering, and then somebody threw a ragged, faded old woolen waistcoat at Enjolras.

He caught it out of the air, and then tossed his silk brocade one back with a reply of "Vive la Republique! Vive la France!"

Grantaire wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't seen it himself, but the three of them shortly left out the front door in clothes that would pass in the dark as working-class, and when the Surete turned up five minutes later nobody in the shop could recall anything odd happening.


End file.
